Food History

I was going to start answering questions today and there is indeed one question to answer. I hope you don’t mind, Alison, if I leave it until Friday. Tomorrow I have a class to blog about and today, well, today I have a charming distraction.

Once upon a time I kept a journal of recipes from friends. I started in 1977, and from 1983 until 1988 I traveled a fair amount. The recipes are the core of my first understanding of cuisines other than my own. I didn’t just travel, I lived with other people who loved cooking and we shared our cuisines. I realized that I didn’t know all my mother’s best recipes, so I wrote them down in the book. From January 2 until July 30 (it goes backwards – in the front section are nursery rhymes and other cool things) I have recipes from all the most interesting cultures and from many fascinating people.

I thought I had lost this book. Today it reappeared, magically, in a part of the flat I had already searched three times. Tonight, therefore, is for reacquainting myself with the basics of home-cooked Japanese food from near Yokohama; for wondering if I should make those Welsh recipes again; for dreaming of Canadian snack food; for yearning after Indonesian chicken.

It also means I can check my assumptions when I do my food history. I didn’t just write down the recipes because I loved them at the time (though this is certainly true) but because memory changes things, and I wanted to be certain of my understanding. Just as my students discovered that modern apples are sweeter and that their palates had memories of more savoury fruit, I can rediscover where my palate has come from and more easily allow for my own biases.

What I’m doing tonight, though, is flicking through the book and remembering the friends who wrote their best recipes down for me. This old diary may be work-related, but there is a great deal of remembered joy hidden between its battered covers.

PS If enough people are interested, I can give some of the non-secret recipes from my notebook. I can explain why the secret recipes are secret, but I can never give them away.

Every now and again on my other blog I open the floor to questions. I’ve just done that today and it suddenly struck me that maybe readers here had their own questions about food and food history.

Food history is long and complex, and there’s a fair chance that some questions will be beyond me. There’s also a fair chance that I can answer others, or at least report back later with an answer. We won’t know which is true about any given question until that question is asked.

From now, then, until Friday morning in anyone’s time zone (your time zone, my time zone, Antarctica Common Time Zone) you can ask any questions you want about food history. You can ask them as comments or you can use the email contact button near my bio. If I can answer them easily I shall and if I can’t, I’ll do my best to explain why an answer is difficult or impossible. This may be when we discover just how ignorant I really am!!

If this works, I’ll do it again. If it ends up with me in a puddle of hopeless humiliation, then I suspect I shan’t.

The thing is, that historians train using very narrow fields. It’s always a challenge translating what I know as an historian into approaches to history and to food that will be of interest to a wider public. The nuances of meaning of a particular word (one of my actual research areas) is really not frightfully interesting to most people. Cultural history does translate, as this blog shows, but there’s a difference between translating things I know and answering questions about what other people want to know.

This could be fun. Maybe. When I come out from my secret hiding place, I’ll let you know if it was fun.

Today is the day of the blogchain. Some of you will have met the blogchain before, others will be here because of it. For everyone else, it’s when a group of writers link to each others’ posts, using the previous one as inspiration. This month’s chain has been rather rollercoastery for me because the first few writers were talking about dogs, and I had this horrible thought that I would have to talk about dogs as food (and maybe their significance historically) which is not something I really want to talk about, to be honest. I was lucky, though, and dogs and cats faded just in time.

Polenth was before me in the chain and said “If the post is about eating bumblebees or cute froglets, I’m going to cry. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

What do I do? I have recipes for frogs and even recipes for dogs, but I won’t give them to you. The thing is, each and every culture has its prohibited areas and all these are no-go for most of us. These prohibitions are legacies of our food history. It means that some things bring us to tears when we think of them as food and some bring us to nausea. These emotions are sometimes linked to the actual foodstuff and its qualities (see yesterday’s post!) but are equally often linked to how we’re brought up and how we see food. What I love doing is tracing the growth and change in these sentiments over time. When a pet becomes food and when foodstuff turn into cosseted cuddlies – these are important to know. Why the changes happen are even more important. They help us define some very fundamental aspects of ourselves.

Now I wonder how Spontaneous Derivation will handle the next link in the chain?

Secret Government EGGO Project
Fantastical Imagination
For the First Time
Virtual Wordsmith
Polyspace
My Life, You’re Welcome to It
Polenth’s Quill
Food History
Spontaneous Derivation
Spittin’ (out words) Like a Llama
Fresh Hell
SLAKE
Forbidden Snowflake
Virginia Lee’s Vagaries

I have an author interview for you. I carried the book to work today and read it on the way to the bus stop, then I read it on the bus, then I read it some more right until I got to class. Scott Gold has written a wholly entertaining volume devoted to his own experiences of eating meat. Along the way he manages to give useful advice on how to choose a good butcher, how meat ought to fit into a life (and he’s very scathing about quality) and a whole bunch more. It’s a US book, so his focus is on what is available in the US, legislation and animal rights, how hard rattlesnake is to fillet and other crucial morsels.

He throws himself so entirely into the experience of tasting 31 types of meat that the book (as I’ve found) is almost impossible to put down. I knew some of his lessons (quality not quantity; cooking counts; meat handling counts, not everything is equally edible) but that still didn’t prevent my copy of the book becoming rather battered in the 24 hours I’ve owned it.

The book is called The Shameless Carnivore, the author is Scott Gold and it was released today in US time. And no, I haven’t been paid to say nice things – I was given an advance copy of the book so I would know what questions to ask. No, you can’t have my copy of the book. Here, have this interview instead:

1. Could you tell us something about yourself and about your book.

Oh my - so much to say! I’m originally from New Orleans, so the love of food is basically written in my genetic code. I studied philosophy and languages in college as well as creative writing, and was working in the publishing business in New York, hoping to maybe one day write a novel (just like everyone and his cousin). Then, through a perfect-storm of serendipity, I got the opportunity to write a book proposal for a “carnivore’s polemic.” When I started writing about food — and especially meat — the passion flew out of me in a way it had never done with any other subject. So I decided to take my passion for carnivorism to its logical extreme. This meant a two part plan:
1) to examine the subject of meat philosophically, from all angles. It would be entirely too easy to write an anti-vegetarian screed, but that was never my desire or intention. As someone with an unabiding love of meat products, I really wanted to dig deeply into the subject of what it means to be an animal who survives on eating the flesh of other animals, from angles ranging from anthropological to dietary, historical (I’m a culinary history junkie), medical, ethical and spiritual, agricultural, environmental, you name it. And
2) to become the “ultimate carnivore” by trying to eat 31 different animals in month, and then every cut and organ of a cow. Along the way there were other adventures, mostly hilarious but sometimes poignant, that included hunting squirrels in Louisiana, attending the 24th annual Testicle Festival in Montana, and even helping a family farm butcher their cow for that year’s meat. It was all pretty amazing.

2. Did any part of your family food history inspire the book (anecdotes of the “No! Keep that out of your mouth!” type are the obvious, but I was thinking as well of maybe a particular attitude towards food eg an intellectual or emotional response.).

Again, it all goes back to being a native New Orleanian. Back home, food is an integral part of the culture in a way unique from any other American city — people adore food there, but not just the rich, and not just the fancy restaurants and haute cuisine. From a floor captain at a place like Galatoire’s or Commander’s Palace to the guy who collects trash on the side of I-10, everyone in NOLA has a love affair with the local cuisine. Sometimes that means a gorgeous turtle soup au sherry (a classic) — I made it from scratch for the book, and it took two days — or maybe just a muffaletta sandwich, chicken and sausage jamballaya, red beans and rice, or a roast beef po-boy swimming in mayonnaise and gravy. NOLA cuisine, as well as an ingrained atmosphere of fun (and, yes, maybe a little sin) is the ultimate bond of the people. Also, my mother is a wonderful cook in her own right, and used our family dinner table to experiment with different cuisines, everything from spiced lamb patties with couscous to chicken and tasso pasta, and everything in between. With an upbringing like that, winding up as a food writer was almost a foregone conclusion.

Great. I’m making myself hungry. Again.

3. Being Jewish myself, I looked at the description of the book and thought “If only I had the courage to do that, I could try all those Ancient Roman recipes.” How did the Jewish aspect affect what you did? How do you explain it/justify it/deal with it?

This is how I dealt with it: I didn’t. I’ve never kept kosher…being a lifelong, rabid omnivore, any sort of dietary restrictions (other than making sure that you try to keep a relatively diet most of the time) have always seemed crazy to me. In fact, by the time I’d finished the book I’d pretty much broken every dietary law laid down in Leviticus 11, in which the “ye shall not eat” category is filled with things that are spine-meltingly delicious. Oddly, locusts and grasshoppers are perfectly kosher, but I’ve never felt an overwhelming urge to eat them. Pork belly, on the other hand…

4. What is the meat you most want to see put onto modern menus (that isn’t there already)?

A great question. I have to say, unequivocally: goat. It has such a rich tradition in so many other cultures, and yet American goat consumption has been on a sharp, steady decline over the last hundred years or so. And this despite the fact that goat is every bit as delicious as lamb (though with its own unique flavors), not to mention that most foodies have little compunction about eating goat’s milk cheeses like chevre. But suggest to them a goat pate or maybe rack of goat, and suddenly they get all squeamish. This, to me, is utter lunacy. What is it about goat that’s so off-putting? Luckily, there’s a growing number of independent goat farms that now provide outstanding, humanely and organically raised goat meat, and I’m singing its praises every chance I get.

5. What is the meat you least want to see again and wouldn’t even feed your worst enemy?

Bull penis (or “pizzle”), hands down. Just unconscionably disgusting. Most everything else was great, though, especially all the savory variety meats like calf’s brains, kidneys, bone marrow (oooooohhhh), tripe, blood sausage, you name it.

6. Has the experience changed how you approach everyday foods?

It always surprises people to hear this, but I actually eat less meat now than ever before. Me: The Shameless Carnivore! After everything I’ve learned in my research, I’ve made a conscious decision to try to eat only truly splendid meat. Usually, this means that I have to pay significantly more for it, and hence have it in my diet a little less often. But I’d much rather eat vegetarian a few times a week if it means sitting down to a meal of truly succulent, humanely raised, grass-fed beef or lamb at the end of the day. And when you start to really consider your meat, to take it seriously, I’ve found that you actually end up enjoying it that much more.

7. Please, can we have a favourite recipe?

It’s too hard to pick just one, but please see my book for some of my favorites, including Crock-Pot Rabbit, Tibetan Yak Momos, Herb-crusted Rack of Lamb and more!

I talk a lot about historical trends in Australian cuisine, but I don’t think I’ve given you short and simple digest of what happened. Short and over-simple, but it will help make sense of my witterings when I wander off into bush food or start talking fusion cooking.

Once upon a time, Australian food was dull but worthy. That time wasn’t so long ago. Think of the ad I gave you the other day “Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars.” The seventies, and ‘roo was only on the menu in certain parts of Adelaide.
British food was such a defining part of our cuisine that you can still say to someone “I grew up a meat and three veg person” and they will know exactly what you mean.

There still is an underlay of this food. It’s the firm base that holds all the exciting fusion cuisine together, perhaps. You can see its influence at the food events where comfort is more important than taste. Children’s parties, for instance. Some of the continuing favourites for Aussie children’s parties are birthday cake (of course), fairy or other winged cakes, chocolate crackles, fairy bread, cocktail sausages and sausage rolls (with tomato dipping sauce), snack food (chips and twisties and other healthy delights), jelly (especially green jelly with chocolate frogs drowning inside), cheese hedgehogs, meringues. If you need recipes for any of this, please say. If you see the list and want to scream and run then my diagnosis is that you’ve been to a children’s party recently.

Dull worthiness doesn’t define our cuisine any more, but it’s still important. It’s impossible to understand Australian food without it.

From the 1940s we adopted continental European cakes as if they were our dream food. Baked cheese cake and vanilla slice. They didn’t displace scones and fruit cake – we just enjoyed more types of cakes.

Starting in the 1960s, we have layered and meshed many other cuisines. Greek and Italian and a strangely deformed Chinese food were the first. From there we branched out, and today’s exciting fusion cuisine is one of the most exciting internationally. We use ingredients from everywhere and create recipes that break new ground every day. From our own native bushfood to spices from Asia to cakes from the Mediterranean, everything adds to the amazing modern Australian melting pot. Underlying it, however, and holding it together are still the same British basics from the beginning of modern Australia.

Today at 4.20 pm East Coast Aussie Summer Time, hear all about the Worst Food Disasters in History, live. I have five minutes in Afternoons with Ingrid. Queenslanders can just tune in to ABC Queensland - everyone else might have to go via the ABC website. Apparently it’s findable from all sorts of places (not just Australia), so if you’re bored, check it out about 2 1/2 hours from the time this post goes up.

Note: ABC Australia, not America!!

Welcome to the Kosher Cooking Carnival! It’s a little late, and it’s all my fault. I forgot it was my first week of university teaching when I offered to do it. I also didn’t count on thunderstorms and about a dozen articles due at once. Everything’s a little late except my class on Edible History. That went delightfully. One of my students has a particular interest in the history of ice cream and is prepared to cook to prove it.

Now that it’s here, please enjoy the Carnival. Lots of good links and a couple of rather tempting recipes.

Let’s start with one of the recipes, perhaps. An absolutely delicious parve pie crust. Thank you, Leora, US friends have been known to tell me that something is ‘as easy as apple pie’ and I always wondered just what part the crust played in this.

There’s along history of Jews making sure that fellow Jews get a decent meal for Shabbos. Poor Jews a hundred years ago would scrimp all week to try to achieve this for themselves, too. It’s lovely to see this tradition continued, and with a bake sale, too. Food turning into more food. It makes everyone just that much happier.

Batya tells us about a Chanukat ha-kitchen. Worth doing just for the challah! To balance that challah, you can read about a less-perfect bagel. Having finally found a baker in my hometown who knows how to cook a bagel, I asked him why he gave some of his bagels the toppings I associate with onion rolls. “I don’t know what an onion roll is,” he said. It turned out he hadn’t eaten kosher bagels, either. Life is a city with almost no Jews can be very entertaining.

I envy Batya being snowed in and then finding a cheap sandwich (appropriately linked to Hillel’s name). We had some snowflakes here yesterday and decided it was a miracle. It’s summer in Australia, after all.

Summer doesn’t make me feel less hungry when I look at Batya’s beautiful pictures on eating out in Jerusalem.

Girls Who Network send in a shrimp dish for the Carnival. It looks interesting, but I won’t volunteer to taste it. We all have our definitions of kashruth, and mine doesn’t include shrimp. My great-grandmother’s apparently included bacon on occasion, which I agonise over from time to time, often on this blog. Batya agonises more carefully than I do, with interesting results.

To finish on a really glorious note, Batya sent me a joke from Bangitout. I don’t know the person in question, but I really like the joke. While you spend the next hour pondering restaurant ideas, I’m going to have a cup of tea.

Top Ten Worst Kosher Restaurant Ideas

10. Shalosh Seudos, The Restaurant!

9. All German Cuisine: Gestapos!

8. Just Herring: Shmaltzys

7. Shabbos Leftovers: dubbed ‘Tinfoil’

6. The Yeshiva Dorm Experience

5. Egg Nog and other foods Jesus Consumed

4. Cholent: Greetings and Flatuations

3. Everything fake! Bacon, Cheese Burger, Shrimp: Facons!

2. Fast Day Theme: dubbed “Fast food”

1. Kosher For Passover Food, All Year Round!

Today is such a foodie day that I had to share it.

I’ve just been cutting a picture of pepperberries and wattleseed down to size so I can use it for a project. Pepperberries and wattleseed are indigenous Aussie yummy things. Some of the stuff that are changing our food history – I wrote about them in general a few days ago and today I was playing with pictures.

I have five little article-y things to write, one of which will be illustrated by said picture. When these article-y things see the light of day, rest assured I shall mention it here. They’re food rather than food history, but no less interesting for that.

The other big thing in my day is revising my course notes. These course notes are a series of recipes, in modern menu form, so that my students can fully enjoy the food from the various eras we study. I want to add a couple more menus and about ten more recipes, and there are few recipes that I need to look at carefully and possibly change for something more interesting. Previous students have told me “Don’t get rid of the mulligatawny soup recipe!” so that’s definitely staying.

I have recipes to send out to three testers for the Prohibition banquet. Mostly soups and desserts, but also a couple of canapés. We have space for more testers, but since I want most things done by Passover (late April) you might want to email banquet (at) conflux.org.au now, rather than in a month’s time.

That’s not my whole day, but it’s my foodie day. I’m supplementing it with Milawa chevre and a parmesan/cracked pepper woodfired oven bread and green olives marinated in garlic. Foodie days are perfect when just a little gourmet food accompanies them.

Yesterday was setting a mood. Let me explain, before you get the wrong idea, that the mood was for me, not for you. It wasn’t setting a mood to lure you into some sort of dark corner of history, though, now I mention it, that sort of mood-setting seems like a good idea. What I was trying to do was remind myself that colds don’t stop work. Which they don’t. They just want to.

I’ve talked myself into enjoying work so much that I started blogging (on my other blog)about character introduction in a seventeenth century recipe book, using the opening recipe. It was possibly not the most sensible post I’ve ever written, but it was terribly educational. Almost frighteningly educational.

I’ll balance things (now that the worst of the cold is over) by giving you some more of Grandma’s recipes. After all, I mentioned them yesterday, so it’s almost as if I meant it.

Before I get to the recipes, I just thought I’d warn you that my Edible Past course starts next week. This means my thoughts will be ranging over different historical periods again. This is the time when – if you yearn for a Medieval recipe or a Jane Austen syllabub recipe – you really should say so. Otherwise I’ll go back to looking at the food descriptions in my favourite novels. I always threaten this and life always catches up with me before I can follow through. Maybe this time it will actually happen.

Now for a recipe!! 1950s Melbourne, of course.

Eggless Date Cake

Place in a mixing bowl ½ cup sugar, 1 cup dates ( chopped) & 1 tablespoon butter. Sprinkle with 1 teaspoon soda. Pour 1 cup boiling water over & beat a few minutes. Sift in 1 ½ cups flour & mix well. Bake in bar shaped tin in fairly hot oven for ½ to ¾ hours. 1 tablespoon chopped ginger.

There are just four more days to get a comment on any of the posts about Felicity Pulman or by her to be in the running for an omnibus edition of the first two novels in The Janna Mysteries.

Right now the biltong post is my favourite, because I have failed (yet again) to have a volunteer trial the Ancient Roman fish-sauce equivalent for me. Why won’t anyone make it? I mean, just because it takes six weeks and smells foul…

Food history alert: ABC 666 (Canberra) tomorrow at 11.30 am. It’s an interview. I might get to talk about murderous molasses!

I have no idea how to get radio stations from outside a region, though I do believe it’s possible. If any of you know, I’d be happy to post the details here.

Update: The radio station is and the interview will occur at 11.30 am Australian Eastern Summer Time, on Friday 8 February. It’s a short interview though, so better to be a bit early online if you want to catch it.

Latest update: the interview is now from 11 am until 11.30 am. I’m getting nervous!!

Do you remember the book by Felicity Pulman - the first two parts of the Janna Mysteries? Perfect reading for teenage girls, lovers of the Middle Ages, lovers of mystery and anyone else who enjoys a good read? Well, she has kindly given me a copy to give away. Comment on any post by or about her by February 23* and you will be in the running. You want a link back to one of her posts? Maybe I’ll give it to you.

Make sure your comment has a valid email address.

*Launch date of the next book in the series, Willows for Weeping.

The owner of the Carnival of Australia loves my blog and is becoming a grandmother. Two very good reasons to pay her a visit. (No, this is not the regular post of the day - this is a cool little extra - yes, there will be election cakes later. Really. Truly. Just because it’s sweltering outside doesn’t mean I don’t want to think about food today. Really. Truly.)

Three bits of news, mainly of interest to people who live in or near Canberra. I’ve added some excruciating jokes to keep non-Canberrans amused, though, because I’m in that sort of mood.

First of all, there will be an article of interest in the Canberra Times this Sunday. If there’s a picture of me with it you can use it to improve your dart-throwing skills. There may well be a picture, since a photographer is coming to visit me on Thursday afternoon. I plan to introduce the photographer to my moustache cup “Photographer – moustache cup; moustache cup – Photographer” because I think they may deal well together.

I don’t know what will be in the article, though I made sure to mention death-dealing molasses and suicidal gourmands when I was interviewed. The interview started off about my teaching in general, but it soon turned to food, as almost everything in my life does right now.

Secondly, Edible History, the food history course I’m teaching at the Australian National University starting 21 February is completely booked out. How about that for a totally useless announcement? By the time I told you about it, it was already too late to book. It’s a happy announcement though. It’s every educator’s dream to have courses that are much-enjoyed.

Thirdly, because Edible History has booked out so very early, the ANU decided to offer it a second time, starting 1 May. You can be absolutely certain that I will have all sorts of new ideas and enthusiasms for the second course, even though it will use the same handbook as the first.

Both courses will, of course include a formal introduction for my students. “Students – moustache cup; moustache cup – students.” They will also include a brand new element to my theory of the history of coffee, one which I shan’t say anything about till I’ve taught it at least once. After all, these hordes of food history enthusiasts need something more than a formal introduction to a moustache cup.

There is so much talk around about the US elections. They’re going to be with us for most of this year, too. Rather than ignore them, I thought it would be fun to treat them as an adjunct to food history. After all, the US is probably the only country where the results of the elections affect the rest of the world so very much.

I’m not going to tally votes or discuss policies. I would like to, but this isn’t the right blog for that (I heard that sigh of relief from most readers – it was such a big sigh of relief that it crossed continents and oceans). What I’m going to do is sample various historic US cookbooks and find their recipes for election cakes. I might even find out what other politics emerges in those cookbooks, for the minority of you who didn’t heave a sigh of relief. Either way, we’re not talking modern politics.

I’ll be watching the vote count later in the year, because my best friend and I always do an online check of the world’s level of sanity. Here, though, you’ll find recipes and places where foodways intersect politics.

Politics and foodways have natural meeting points. Polling booths in Australia often sport a sausage sizzle, which is usually a fundraiser for a local school or a local community organisation. Parties and individuals fundraise with food and cookbooks and all sorts of exciting foodie things. If any of you have cookbooks sold at election time, please email me, and I’ll mention your book as part of this new series on election food.

Election food. There’s so much of it. Conventions can have food, and caucuses. Party meetings can have food and post election get-togethers. I can’t promise to explore all of these. I can promise the historical cookbooks and other curious stuff as the occasion arises. It’s going to be fun. Even if you hate politics, some of the cakes are scrumptious. Politics can bring happiness. Sometimes.